Striving For Success

All this striving for success is exhausting.

I'm in my 43rd year on this earth and this has certainly been my experience. Most people I have ever spoken to about it agree that there's something in this striving for success that just doesn't fit.

The reality of our experience seems to be completely different from what we're told we need to do, what we believe it takes to get what we want.

Popular commentary tells us we've got to set goals and make a plan. They say success is a science and there are specific steps that everyone can take to achieve their goals and find happiness.

After all, that's what we're chasing after isn't it, happiness?

The amount of productivity, motivation and material out there is staggering. Most of it I would hasten to say is merely a rehash of what's come before only packaged differently.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that this material is fundamentally flawed, but if these things are so vital to success and they are supposed to work, then why don't they work for the majority of people?

Why are there so many people suffering to varying degrees through their days if these tools and strategies worked?

There is something missing in all of this.

It appears that the answer is not there.

There Is Something Missing From The Recipe

I won a county championship once with my club. I won a couple of leagues and the odd cup competition too.

Those wins were nice, I enjoyed them. The experience and the celebration later with team mates was great, but I noticed a couple of things about those successes.

The first thing was, winning the championship was never a predetermined goal for us.

At the start of the season we thought; yeah, we could win this thing, why not. So we took it one game at a time and when we reached the quarterfinal stages we started to believe we had a solid chance to win.

In other words we didn't look beyond the next game and as we progressed belief grew.

Winning was great, but on reflection the thrill of the win didn't last. Within a day or so, or even sooner, the satisfaction began to wear off.

Achievement seems to be like that.

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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. – Annie Dillard

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Achievement of the big goal it seems, never feels as great as our anticipation of it. We want the car or the house of whatever, and when we get it it's like, ok great – next.

When I was in my mid 30's I was driving a van for my work. It was great but I wanted a BMW. I got it and loved it, but a week later it was just there. No big deal.

What I'm saying here is that status, money, stuff, even experiences are worthless in themselves.

They bring no lasting joy and fulfillment.

This idea we have that our lives will be somehow better in the future when we attain these goals of ours is a completely flawed concept and in fact, detrimental to our wellbeing.

I've found that striving for success is the very thing that starves me of the happiness I actually want.

Besides, the future is an illusion.

Your Success Is A Measure Of Wealth

I have come to believe that pursuit and attainment of goals a is waste of time.

Popular commentary however will suggest that this idea is the one that's flawed. For how else are individual lives or indeed the world to be improved?

How else can we better our lives if it is not in the pursuit of a better version of ourselves?

They'll recommend books for example, by great entrepreneurs who've made millions and served the world greatly. They'll show you their process suggesting, here! Here's how it's done!

Is that really what it's all about?

Do we all need to follow one set of rules to find what it is we are looking for?

I believe we're chasing our tail.

We are ceaselessly seeking happiness is the lives of other people. Entrepreneurs and celebrity are the new Gods. We worship them and want to be like them, albeit most of the time in the privacy of our own minds.

We pretend to be happy but we secretly covet success and lament where we are.

I should point out that I don't have a problem with money and stuff. I like stuff just the same as you.

Money helps me get stuff like this MacBook I'm writing on which I value so highly. But money is a means of exchange, that's all.

It has no inherent value of its own and therefore if we make it, or it's material counterparts, the sole reason for creating then we are lost.

We've Lost The Truth

Annie Dillard in her book, The Writing Life, says; “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”. In other words, what we do now, in every now we find ourselves, is what our lives become.

Therefore if we spend our entire life in pursuit of stuff, status, book deals, jobs, money and mountains of other shit, then our entire lives are spent pursuing and never seeing the beauty in what we've got.

There is a common idea that suggests that impetus to better comes out of the feeling of dissatisfaction. If we didn't feel unease and dissatisfaction then the world would never progress.

Need is the mother of all invention after all, correct?

Well, I'd agree with that to a certain extent. However, we were not meant to live an eternity in need and want.

That's what striving is, an almost eternal effort in pursuit of something missing.

It's like pushing a boulder up a hill. At some stage in our evolution we've got to understand that this process of working our bollocks off only results in a predominantly dysfunctional state of mind.

Add some worldwide scale to that and you can see what it produces.

A couple hundred years ago the masses were lured to employment by the promise of a better life.

Well it didn't come. Not permanently anyway.

Although working conditions have improved immeasurably, we still for the most part work this way and under the same promise of a better life in some future or other.

We are hypnotised under the idea that we must work to live.

To be worthy of a comfortable life you've got to strive and achieve. Don't measure up and you're out.

All We Want Is Happiness

We all want to be happy but instead of experiencing that happiness what we feel is like predominant mild discomfort, dissatisfaction and frustration.

Happiness is something that we achieve on rare occasions. For most of us it's more like a case of meh most of the time.

It's off there in the future somewhere and if we just keep doing what we're doing we'll get there.

Won't we?

Bollocks!

Here's a conversation between photographer Donal Maloney and Martin Hart, a guy who lives on the street that Donal befriended.

Martin: “I think happiness is an illusion really. The simple things in life that make me happy are, reading a book, or even feeding the pigeons. Christmas makes me happy, even the coming of spring makes me happy, summer make me happy, snow makes me happy, even rain, thunder and lightning even”.

Donal: When was the last time you were unhappy?

Martin: “I can't think of unhappiness, I couldn't describe it to you”.

Donal: “What do think makes me happy?”

Martin: “I don't think you could ever be happy”.

Donal: “Why do you think I could never be happy?”

Martin: “Because you're looking to find happiness”.

How to Find Success

I would like to add to Annie Dillard's earlier quote as follows; How we spend our moments is how we spend our days, and how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

Success is an arbitrary concept. It is a state of mind and the precursor, the foundation of everything we experience.

It's a bit of an esoteric cliché, however, there is only Now. An eternal moment and nothing else.

I figured this out, or rather I had a download of this realisation one day as I drove my van down the M50 motorway. I realised that Now is all there is. There is no future and there is no past, only what we have come to call memory and imagination.

As I've written before, psychological studies such as the now very well known eyewitness testimony research by Elizabeth Loftus, show us that we construct memory rather than recall it.

Imagination is in fact creating our past and our future, and it does it Now.

It is my contention that striving for things places us in an ever present mode of dissatisfaction. No matter how well you dress it up and excuse it, that's what it is.

It is the absence of happiness.

So I talk to myself.

I say, if you want to be happy, be happy. Be thankful for what you've got and realise that just because you are, that doesn't mean you're giving up on your dreams or ambitions.

I've come to understand that there is another more meaningful and nourishing means to achieving success.

Although, I need constant reminders of that, because just like you I get drawn into the noisy world all too often.

We've got to draw the majority of our sense of success and happiness from what we are currently doing. Failing that we just spend our time in a place outside our own minds.

Martin Hart has helped me understand that recently.